Also byTemple Grandin
Eme1Eence: Labeled Autistic (with Margaret M. Scariano) Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism Genetics and the Behavior ofDomestic Animals Livestock Handling and Transport Also by Catherine Johnson
Shadow Syndromes: The Mild Forms ofMajor Mental Disorders That Sabotage Us (with John J. Ratey) Lucky in Love: The Secrets ofHappy Couples and How Their Marriages Thrive When to Say Goodbye to Your Therapist ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION Using the Mysteries of Autism
to Decode Animal Behavior
Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson
AHarvest Book • Harcourt, Inc.
Orlando Austin New York
San Diego Toronto London
CD MY STORY
eople who aren't autistic always ask me about the moment r
realized r could understand the way animals think. They think r
must have had an epiphany.
But it wasn't like that. It took me a long time to figure out that
r see things about animals other people don't. And it wasn't until r
was in my forties that r finally realized r had one big advantage
over the feedlot owners who were hiring me to manage their ani­
mals: being autistic. Autism made school and social life hard, but it
made animals easy.
r had no idea r had a special connection to animals when r was lit­
tle. I liked animals, but I had enough problems just trying to figure
out things like why a really small dog isn't a cat. That was a big crisis
in my life. All the dogs I knew were pretty big, and I used to sort
them by size. Then the neighbors bought a dachshund, and I was
totally confused. r kept saying, "How can it be a dog?" r studied and
studied that dachshund, trying to figure it out. Finally I realized that
the dachshund had the same kind of nose my golden retriever did,
and I got it. Dogs have dog noses.
That was pretty much the extent of my expertise when I was five.
r started to fall in love with animals in high school when my
mother sent me to a special boarding school for gifted children with
emotional problems. Back then they called everything "emotional
problems." Mother had to find a place for me because I got kicked
out of high school for fighting. I got in fights because kids teased
me. They'd call me names, like "Retard," or "Tape recorder."
They called me Tape Recorder because I'd stored up a lot of
phrases in my memory and I used them over and over again in every
Conversation. Plus there were only a few conversations I liked to
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Animals in Translation
My Story
have, so that amplified the effect. I especially liked to talk about the
rotor ride at the carnival. 1 would go up to somebody and say, "I
went to Nantasket Park and 1 went on the rotor and I really liked
the way it pushed me up against the wall." Then 1 would say stuff
like, "How did you like it?" and they'd say how they liked it, and
then I'd tell the story allover again, start to finish. It was like a loop
inside my head, it just ran over and over again. So the kids called me
Tape Recorder.
Teasing hurts. The kids would tease me, so I'd get mad and smack
'em. That simple. They always started it, they liked to see me react.
My new school solved that problem. The school had a stable and
horses for the kids to ride, and the teachers took away horseback rid­
ing privileges if 1 smacked somebody. After I lost privileges enough
times 1 learned just to cry when somebody did something bad to
me. I'd cry, and that would take away the aggression. I still cry when
people are mean to me.
Nothing ever happened to the kids who were teasing.
The funny thing about the school was, the horses had emotional
problems, too. They had emotional problems because in order to
save money the headmaster was buying cheap horses. They'd been
marked down because they had gigantic behavior problems. They
were pretty, their legs were fine, but emotionally they were a mess.
The school had nine horses altogether, and two of them couldn't be
ridden at all. Half the horses in that barn had serious psychological
problems. But I didn't understand that as a fourteen-year-old.
So there we all were up at boarding school, a bunch of emotion­
ally disturbed teenagers living with a bunch of emotionally disturbed
animals. There was one horse, Lady, who was a good horse when
you rode her in the ring, but on the trail she would go berserk. She
would rear, and constantly jump around and prance; you had to
hold her back with the bridle or she'd bolt to the barn.
Then there was Beauty. You could ride Beauty, but he had very
nasty habits like kicking and biting while you were in the saddle. He
would swing his foot up and kick you in the leg or foot, or turn his
head around and bite your knee. You had to watch out. Whenever
you tried to mount Beauty he kicked and bit-you had both ends
coming at you at the same time.
But that was nothing compared to Goldie, who reared and
plunged whenever anyone tried to sit on her back. There was no way
to ride that horse; it was all you could do just to stay in the saddle. If
you did ride her, Goldie would work herself up into an absolute
sweat. In five minutes she'd be drenched, dripping wet. It was flop
sweat. Pure fear. She was terrified of being ridden.
Goldie was a beautiful horse, though; light brown with a golden
mane and tail. She was built like an Arab horse, slender and fine, and
had perfect ground manners. You could walk her on a lead, you
could groom her, you could do anything you liked and she was per­
fectly behaved just so long as you didn't try to ride her. That sounds
like an obvious problem for any nervous horse to have, but it can go
the other way, too. I've known horses where people say, "Yeah you
can ride them, but that's all you can do with them." That kind of
horse is fine with people in the saddle, and nasty to people on the
ground.
All the horses at the school had been abused. The lady they
bought Goldie from had used a nasty, sharp bit and jerked on it as
hard as she could, so Goldie's tongue was all twisted and deformed.
Beauty had been kept locked in a dairy stanchion all day long. I
don't know why. These were badly abused animals; they were very,
very messed up.
But I had no understanding of this as a girl. I was never mean to
the horses at the school (other kids were sometimes), but I wasn't
any horse-whispering autistic savant, either. I just loved the horses.
I was so wrapped up in them that I spent every spare moment
working the barns. I was dedicated to keeping the barn clean,
making sure the horses were groomed. One of the high points of
my high school career was the day my mom bought me a really
nice English bridle and saddle. That was a huge event in my life,
because it was mine, but also because the saddles at school were so
crummy. We rode on old McClellands, which were honest-to-god
cavalry saddles first used in the Civil War. The school's saddles
probably went back to World War II when they still had some horse
units in the army. The McClelland was designed with a slot down
the center of it to spare the horse's back. The slot was good for
the horse but horrible for the rider. I don't think there's ever been
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My Story
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Animals in Translation
sensation newborns have when they're swaddled, or scuba divers
a more uncomfortable saddle on earth, though I have to say that
when I read about the Northern Alliance soldiers in Mghanistan
riding on saddles made out ofwood, that sounded worse.
Boy did I take care of that saddle. I loved it so much I didn't even
leave it in the tack room where it belonged. I brought it up to my
dorm room every day and kept it with me. I bought special saddle
soap and leather conditioner from the saddle shop, and I spent
hours washing and polishing it.
As happy as I was with the horses at school, my high school years
were hard. When I reached adolescence I was hit by a tidal wave of
anxiety that never stopped. It was the same level of anxiety I felt
later on when I was defending my dissertation in front of my thesis
committee, only I felt that way all day long and all night, too. Noth­
ing bad happened to make me so anxious all of a sudden; I think it
was just one of my autism genes kicking into high gear. Autism has a
lot in common with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is listed as
an anxiety disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Animals saved me. One summer when I was visiting my aunt,
who had a dude ranch in Arizona, I saw a herd of cattle being put
through the squeeze chute at a neighboring ranch. A squeeze chute is
an apparatus vets use to hold cattle still for their shots by squeezing
them so tight they can't move. The squeeze chute looks like a big V
made out of metal bars hinged together at the bottom. When a cow
walks into the chute an air compressor closes up the V, which
squeezes the cow's body in place. The rancher has plenty of space
for his hands and the hypodermic needle between the metal bars.
You can find pictures of them on the Web if you want to see what
they look like.
As soon as I caught sight of that thing I made my aunt stop the
car so I could get out and watch. I was riveted by the sight of those
big animals inside that squeezing machine. You might think cattle
would get really scared when all of a sudden this big metal structure
clamps together on their bodies, but it's exactly the opposite. They
get really calm. When you think about it, it makes sense, because
deep pressure is a calming sensation for just about everyone. That's
one of the reasons a massage feels so good-it'S the deep pressure.
The squeeze chute probably gives cattle a feeling like the soothing
have underwater. They like it.
Watching those cattle calm down, I knew I needed a squeeze chute
of my own. When I got back to school that fall, my high school
teacher helped me build my own squeeze chute, the size of a human
being down on all fours. I bought my own air compressor, and I used
plywood boards for the V. It worked beautifully. Whenever I put
myself inside my squeeze machine, I felt calmer. I still use it today.
I got through my teenage years thanks to my squeeze machine
and my horses. Animals kept me going. I spent every waking minute
that I didn't have to be studying or going to school with those
horses. I even rode Lady at a show. It's hard to imagine today, a
school keeping a stable of emotionally disturbed and dangerous
horses for its underaged students to ride. These days you can't even
play dodgeball in gym class because somebody might get hurt. But
that's the way it was. A lot of uS got nipped or stepped on or thrown
at that school, but no one was ever seriously hurt, at least not while
I was there. So it worked out.
I wish more kids could ride horses today. People and animals are
supposed to be together. We spent quite a long time evolving
together, and we used to be partners. Now people are cut off from
animals unless they have a dog or a cat.
Horses are especially good for teenagers. I have a psychiatrist
friend in Massachusetts who has a lot of teenage patients, and he has
a whole different set of expectations for the ones who ride horses.
He says that if you take two kids who have the same problem to the
same degree of severity, and one of them rides a horse regularly and
the other one doesn't, the rider will end up doing better than the
nonrider. For one thing, a horse is a huge responsibility, so any
teenage kid who's looking after a horse is developing good charac­
ter. But for another, riding a horse isn't what it looks like: it isn't a
person sitting in a saddle telling the horse what to do by yanking on
the reins. Real riding is a lot like ballroom dancing or maybe figure
skating in pairs. It's a relationship.
I remember looking down to make sure my horse was on the
right lead. When a horse is cantering around the ring one of his
front hooves has to thrust out farther forward than the other one,
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Animals in Translation
and the rider has to help him do that. If I leaned my body just the
right way, it helped my horse get on the right lead. My sense of bal­
ance was so bad I could never learn to parallel ski no matter how
hard I tried, though I did reach the advanced snowplow stage. Yet
there I was, moving my body in sync with the horse's body to help
him run right.
Horseback riding was joyous for me. I can remember being on a
horse sometimes and we'd gallop in the pasture and that was such a
big thrilL Of course it's not good for horses to run them all the
time, but once in a while we'd get to have a little run, and I'd feel
exhilarated. Or we'd be out on a trail riding, and do a really fast gal­
lop down the road. I remember what it looked like, the trees
whizzing by; I remember that really well to this day.
Riding becomes instinctual after a while; a good rider and his
horse are a team. It's not a one-way relationship, either; it's not just
the human relating to the horse and telling him what to do. Horses
are super-sensitive to their riders and are constantly responding to
the riders' needs even without being asked. School horses-the
horses a stable uses to teach people how to ride-will actually stop
trotting when they feel their rider start to lose his balance. That's
why learning to ride a horse is completely different from learning to
ride a bicycle. The horses make sure nobody gets hurt.
The love a teenager gets from a horse is good for him, and so is the teamwork. For years people always said you needed to send diffi­
cult kids to military school or the army. A lot of times that works because those places are so highly structured. But it would work a lot better if mHitary schools still had horses. Animals in Translation comes out of the forty years I've spent with animals. It's different from any other book I've read about animals, mostly
because I'm different from every other professional who works with
animals. Autistic people can think the way animals think. Of course,
we also think the way people think-we aren't that different from
normal humans. Autism is a kind of way station on the road from
animals to humans, which puts autistic people like me in a perfect
My Story
7
position to translate "animal talk" into English. I can tell people why
their animals are doing the things they do.
I think that's why I was able to become successful in spite of
being autistic. Animal behavior was the right field for me, because
what I was missing in social understanding I could make up for in
understanding animals. Today I've published over three hundred sci­
entific papers, my Web site gets five thousand visitors each month,
and I give thirty-five lectures on animal management a year. I give
another twenty-five or so on autism, so I'm on the road most of the
time. Half the cattle in the United States and Canada are handled in
humane slaughter systems I've designed.
lowe a lot of this to the fact that my brain works differently.
Autism has given me another perspective on animals most profes­
sionals don't have, although a lot of regular people do, which is that
animals are smarter than we think. There are plenty of pet owners
and animal lovers out there who'll tell you "little FluffY can think,"
but animal researchers have mostly dismissed this kind of thing as
wishful thinking.
But I've come to realize that the little old ladies are right. People
who love animals, and who spend a lot of time with animals, often
start to feel intuitively that there's more to animals than meets the
eye. They just don't know what it is, or how to describe it.
I stumbled across the answer, or what I think is part of the answer,
almost by accident. Because of my own problems, I've always followed
neuroscientific research on the human brain as closely as I've followed
my own field. I had to; I'm always looking for answers about how to
manage my own life, not just animals' lives. Following both fields at the
same time led me to see a connection between human intelligence and
animal intelligence the animal sciences have missed.
The literature on autistic savants sparked my discovery. Autistic
savants are people who can do things like tell you what day of the
week you were born based on your birth date, or calculate in their
heads whether your street address is a prime number or not. They
usually have IQs in the mentally retarded range, though not always,
yet they can naturally do things no normal human being can even
be taught to do, no matter how hard he tries to learn or how much
time he spends practicing.
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Animals in Translation
Animals are like autistic savants. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that
animals might actually be autistic savants. Animals have special tal­
ents normal people don't, the same way autistic people have special
talents normal people don't; and at least some animals have special
forms of genius normal people don't, the same way some autistic
savants have special forms of genius. I think most of the time animal
genius probably happens for the same reason autistic genius does: a
difference in the brain autistic people share with animals.
The reason we've managed to live with animals all these years
without noticing many of their special talents is simple: we can't see
those talents. Normal people never have the special talents animals
have, so normal people don't know what to look for. Normal people
can stare straight at an animal doing something brilliant and have no
idea what they're seeing. Animal genius is invisible to the naked eye.
I'm sure I don't know all the talents animals have, either, let alone all
the things they could use their talents to do ifwe gave them the chance.
But now that I've seen the connection between autistic savantry and
animal genius at least I have an idea what I'm looking for: I'm looking
for ways animals can use their amazing ability to perceive thingshumans
can)tperceive, and to remember highly detailed information we can)t re­
member, to make life better for everyone, animals and people alike. Just
offthe top of my head, here's a thought: we have service dogs for the
blind-how about service dogs for the middle-aged whose memories
are going? I'm willing to bet that just about any dog can remember
where you put your car keys better than you can if you're over forty,
and probably ifyou're under forty, too.
Or how about service dogs who remember where your kids left
the remote control? I bet a dog could do this if you gave him the
training.
Ofcourse, I don't know this for a fact. I could be wrong. But for
me, predicting animal talents is getting to be a little like astronomers
predicting the existence of a planet nobody can see based on their
understanding of gravity. I'm starting to be able to accurately predict
animal talents nobody can see based on what I know about autistic
talent.
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Animals in Translation
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SEEING THE WAY ANIMALS SEE:
THE VISUAL ENVIRONMENT
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The only research I was interested in doing at Arizona State was
studying visual illusions in animals. I'm sure I was interested in visual
illusions because I'm a visual thinker. I didn't know it at the time,
but being a visual thinker was the start of my career with animals. It
My Story
17
gave me an important perspective other students and professors
didn't have, because animals are visual creatures, too. Animals are
controlled by what they see.
When I say I'm a visual thinker I don't mean just that I'm good
at making architectural drawings and designs, or that I can design
my cattle-restraining systems in my head. I actually tllink in pictures .
During my thinking process I have no words in my head at all, just
pictures.
That's true no matter what subject I'm thinking about. For instance, if you say tlle word "macroeconomics" to me I get a pic­
ture of tllOse macrame flowerpot holders people used to hang from their ceilings. That's why I can't understand economics or algebra; I can't picture it accurately in my mind. I flunked algebra. But other times thinking in pictures is an advantage. During tlle 1990s I knew all the dot-coms would go to hell, because when I thought about tl1em tl1e only images I saw were rented office space and computers that would be obsolete in two years. There wasn't anytl1ing real I could picture; tl1e companies had no hard assets. My stockbroker asked me how I knew the two stock market crashes would happen, and I told him, "When tl1e Monopoly play money starts jerking around the real money you're in trouble." IfI'm thinking about a structure I'm working on, all of my judg­
ments and decisions about it happen in pictures. I see images of my
design going together smoothly, images of problems and sticking
points, or images of tlle whole thing collapsing if there's a major
design flaw.
That's the point where words come in, after I've finished thinking
it tl1rough. Then I'll say something like, "That won't work because
it will collapse." My final judgment comes out in words, but not the
process that led up to the judgment. If you think about a judge and
jury, all my deliberations are in pictures, and only my final verdict is
in words.
If I'm alone I'll say the verdict out loud, tl10ugh I don't do it
with other people around because I know I'm not supposed to. In
COllege I did a lot of talking out loud because it helped me organize
my thinking. A lot of autistic people talk out loud for the same rea­
Son. I'll also do some extremely simple running commentary in
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Animals in Translation
words. I'll say, "Let's try this," or, "Oh boy! I figured it out." The
language is always simple. It's the pictures that are complex.
When I talk to other people I translate my pictures into stock
phrases or sentences I have "on tape" inside my head. Those kids
who called me Tape Recorder were right about me. They were
mean, but they were right. I am a tape recorder. That's how I'm
able to talk. The reason I don't sound like a tape recorder anymore
is that I have so many stock phrases and sentences I can move
around into new combinations. All my public speaking has been a
huge help. When I got criticisms saying I always gave the same
speech, I started moving my slides around. That moved my phrases
around, too.
When I was young I had no idea that being a visual thinker made
me different from anyone else. I thought everyone saw pictures
inside their heads. So naturally, when I didn't like the lab work I was
doing and wanted to start learning about animals in their natural
environments, I focused on the visual environment. It wasn't a con­
scious decision, it was just what I naturally gravitated to.
Being verbal thinkers, behaviorists hadn't really thought about
the visual environment. When they talked about the environment
rewarding or punishing an animal in response to something it did,
they usually meant food and electric shocks. That made sense for a
Skinner box, where there's nothing much to look at, and ifyou mess
up you get a shock. (A Skinner box was a special cage, usually a
Plexiglas box, behaviorists used to test and analyze a rat's behavior.
There was nothing in it except a lever and maybe some indicator
lights that went on or offwhen a reward was available.) Most Skin­
ner boxes didn't shock the animals, but if punishment was part of
the experiment, usually the punishment would be a shock.
In the wild, though, there aren't any electric shocks, and you
can't get food by pecking a lever. You get food by being highly
attuned to the visual environment. Behaviorists finally started to
catch on to the importance of vision to an animal when somebody
did a famous experiment showing you could teach a monkey how to
push a lever just by letting him look outside a window every time he
hit the lever. They didn't need to give the monkey a food reward,
just a view. Animals need to see, and they want to see.
My Story
19
While I was doing my research on visual illusions in the lab I
started to hang out in feed yards with the cattle, where I noticed
that a lot of times the animals didn't want to go through the chutes,
which are the narrow passageways the cattle go through on the way
to the squeeze chute. When I saw cattle balking and acting scared I
just naturally thought, "Well let's look at it from the animal's point
ofview. I've got to get in the chute and see what he's seeing."
So I took pictures inside the chutes from the cattle's point of
view. I even put black-and-white film in my camera because we
thought animals saw in black and white. (Later on we learned that
they see colors, too, but not in as wide a spectrum as we do.) I
wanted to see what they were seeing.
That's when I noticed that simple things, like shadows or chains
hanging down, made the animals balk.
The people at the feed yards thought my whole project was
ridiculous. They couldn't imagine why I'd get in there and try to see
what the cattle were seeing. Now I realize that in my own way I was
being just as anthropomorphic as those people who gave the lion the
pillow. Since I was a visual thinker I assumed cows were, too. The
difference was I happened to be right.
When you're trying to understand how the environment is affect­
ing an animal's behavior, you have to look at what the animal is see­
ing. I remember one time I went to a plant where they had a yellow
metal ladder on a wall inside a building. The cattle had to go by it
when they walked through a narrow alley. Those cattle just would
not walk by that ladder. They'd plant their feet on the ground and
refuse to move. Finally one of the yard people figured out the prob­
lem. He painted the ladder gray, and everything was fine. I work
with management and with the employees down on the floor or in
the yard, and I've found that a lot of times the guys in the yard are
better at understanding animals than management.
If a cow sees a yellow raincoat flapping on a fence, she's in a
panic. But if you aren't a visual thinker, it can be hard to even notice
that yellow raincoat flapping on the fence. It doesn't jump out at
normal people the way it does at me or at a cow.
Since I didn't realize other people thought in words instead of
pictures, for a long time I could never figure out why so many animal
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Animals in Translation
handlers made such obvious, elementary mistakes. Not all of them
do; I've met lots of good animal handlers in the meatpacking indus­
try. But I was always surprised when I found an animal professional
doing something that was just plain dumb. Why couldn't they see
what they were doing wrong?
I remember one situation in particular, where the owner of a
cattle-handling facility hired me as a last resort before they tore the
whole place down and built it back up from the ground. He called
me because his cattle wouldn't walk inside the narrow passage lead­
ing to the squeeze chute.
The problem wasn't that the cattle were afraid of getting their
shots. Most cattle don't even know they're going to be getting shots
inside the chute. Besides, a lot of animals barely feel their shots any­
way. New dog owners are always surprised by this. They'll watch
their dog cower and cringe as the vet examines him, then not blink
an eye when he sticks him with a needle. Some vets say that's the
difference between a dog, who isn't anticipating pain, and a person,
who is. Thinking about a shot makes it worse.
The problem at the cattle-handling facility had to be something
they were doing wrong, since those cattle were perfectly fine befure
they got there. But the owner couldn't figure it out. He needed to
fix the situation fast, too, because skipping vaccinations isn't an
option. Cattle aren't like children, who get vaccinated against a lot
of diseases like polio or whooping cough that are pretty hard to
catch nowadays. Cattle are extremely susceptible to bovine viral diar­
rhea and to respiratory diseases like pneumonia. If they don't get
their shots, infectious disease will sweep through the herd and kill
10 percent of the animals. So you have to vaccinate, and in order to
vaccinate you have to have your cattle walk into the squeeze chute.
These cattle wouldn't do it, and the owner was starting to panic.
Things had gotten so bad the handlers were using cattle prods,
which are fiberglass rods with two prongs on the end that deliver an
electric shock to an animal. Prods will get an animal moving, but
they're stupid things to use because they can panic the animals and
make them rear up, which is dangerous for the workers. Prods
always stress an animal, and when an animal is stressed his immune
system goes down and he starts getting sick, which means higher
My Story
21
veterinary bills. Plus stressed animals gain less weight, which means
less meat to sell. Dairy cattle who've been handled with prods give
lessStress
milk· is bad for human growth, toO, although most people don't
realize it. The one thing people do know about is failure to thrive,
when children who've been badly abused or neglected suffer stress
dwarfism. The child's biology is normal and he's eating enough
food, but he doesn't grow. Stress dwarfism is pretty rare, but there's
evidence that stressed children, just like stressed animals, can grow
more slowly than calmer children. Researchers have known for quite
a while that anxious adults often have low levels of growth hormone,
and a study in 1997 found that anxious girls, though not anxious
boys, were more likely to be short than calm girls.
My guess is that eventually we'll find out anxious boys are smaller,
too. Anxious male animals are smaller than calm male animals, and I
don't see any reason why human males should be different. I think
the German orphanage story probably tells us stress is bad for boys,
too. That's the famous case of two orphanages in postwar Germany
where one was run by a nice headmistress, while a mean lady who
made fun of the children in front of their friends ran the other. She
was nice only to the eight children who were her special favorites.
None ofthe children had enough food, and all ofthem were smaller
than they were supposed to be. Then a natural experiment happened
when the government gave the children living with the nice lady extra
rations-at the very same moment that the nice lady quit her job and
left, and the mean lady was hired in her place. The eight teacher'S pets
moved to the new orphanage with the mean director. Doctors were
measuring all the children's growth, and they found that even though
the children in the first orphanage were getting extra food, now that
they were stressed by a nasty adult they didn't grow as well as the chil­
dren in the other orphanage. They had more food but grew less. The
eight favorites grew better than anyone. Both orphanages had boys as
well as girls, so I assume the boys' growth was slowed by stress, too.
With animals there's no ambiguity: stress is horrible for growth,
period, which means stress is horrible for profits. So even a feedlot
owner who doesn't care about an animal's feelings doesn't like using
prods, because a stressed animal means financial loss.
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22
Animals in Translation
When I
to the feedlot it took me about ten minutes to figure
out the problem.
To get to the squeeze chute, first the animals had to walk inside
the barn door into a round holding area called a crowd pen. That
part of the procedure went off without a hitch. The cattle didn't
have any problem stepping inside the pen.
Next they were supposed to walk into a curved single-file alley
(it's also called a chute) that led to the squeeze chute. That was where the cattle balked. They just would not walk into the alley. It
was the exact same alley feedlots allover the world were using with­
out any trouble, so no one could figure out what the problem was.
They couldn't see anything about their setup that was different from
any other setup.
But to me it was obvious: the alley was too dark. The cattle were
supposed to walk from broad daylight into an unlit indoor alley, and
the contrast in illumination was too sharp. They were afraid to walk
into pitch-black space.
That might seem a little surprising, since prey animals, like cattle,
deer, and horses, usually like the dark. They can hide in the dark and
feel safe, or at least safer than they feel during the day. But the prob­
lem wasn't the dark, it was the contrast of going from bright sun­
light to a dark interior. Animals never like going from bright to dark.
They don't like any kind of experience that temporarily blinds them,
and that includes looking into a bright light when they're standing
in relative darkness. I've found that cattle won't even walk toward a
glaring lightbulb. You have to use indirect lighting at the mouth of an alley to make it work. As soon as I saw the setup I figured that was the problem, and I confirmed my guess when I asked the owner how the cattle behaved
at different times of the day, and in different kinds of weather. When
he thought about it, he realized that the facility worked fine at
night. Things weren't too bad on cloudy days, either. It was the
bright, sunny days that were impossible, but no one had noticed the
pattern.
I think a number of things are at work when an animal reacts that way. Cattle have excellent night vision and are used to seeing well in
the dark, unlike people. So the experience of going temporarily
My Story
23
blind in the seconds before their irises expand, which is something
people take for granted, probably makes them panic. Also, cows
don't live in houses with electricity and drive around in cars at night
the way we do, so they don't develop a mental category called "eyes
adjusting to an abrupt change in illumination." Last but not least,
animals are so intensely sensitive to the visual world that I wouldn't
be surprised to find out that sudden huge changes in illumination
are physically painful in some way. People don't enjoy the experience
of moving from brilliant light to a dark room, either, but for a cow it
must be overwhelming.
Maybe when those cattle started to walk out of the sun into the
chute they felt like they were going blind for real. They might have
been having the same reaction you or I would have if we were driv­
ing down the street and suddenly went blind every time we drove
through an wlderpass. If you went blind every time you drove
through an underpass you wouldn't drive tllrough underpasses.
I always tell people: whenever you're having a problem with an an­
imal, try to see what the animal is seeing and experience what the animal
is experiencing. There are lots of things that can upset an animal­
smells, changes in routine, exposure to things he hasn't experienced
before-and you should consider all of them. Anything in the sensory
realm can upset an animal. But don't forget to ask yourself what your
dog, cat, horse, or cow may be seeing that's bothering him.
more light inside
At that feedlot, all they needed to do was
the barn. They could have fixed the problem themselves in five min­
utes if they'd been able to think about the chute from the animal's
point of view. The answer was right in front of them. I really do
mean directly in front of them, because the people who built the
barn in the first place had installed a big sliding garage door on the
front of the barn that the owner had left closed.
When I told him all they needed to do was open the door, it
turned out that it hadn't been opened once since the lot was built.
They didn't even know if they could open it after all this time. But
they got a couple of guys to put their shoulders up against the door,
and after a few minutes of straining and grunting they got the thing
open. That was the end of the problem. The cows all walked into
the chute just as nice as could be.
f
24
Animals in Translation
WHAT PEOPLE SEE AND DON'T SEE
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That feedlot consultation was the kind of thing that started to give
me a reputation for having practically a magical connection to ani­
mals. Meanwhile I was always mystified by these situations, because
to me the answers seemed so obvious. Why couldn't other people see
what the matter was?
It took me fifteen years to figure out that other people actually
couldn't see what the problem was, at least not without a lot of
training and practice. They couldn't see it because they weren't visu­
ally oriented the way animals and autistic people are.
I always find it kind of funny that normal people are always saying
autistic children "live in their own little world." 'When you work
with animals for a while you start to realize you can say the same
thing about normal people. There's a great big, beautiful world out
there that a lot of normal folks are just barely taking in. It's like dogs
hearing a whole register of sound we can't. Autistic people and ani­
mals are seeing a whole register of the visual world normal people
can't, or don't.
I don't just mean this metaphorically, either. Normal people liter­
ally don't see a lot of things. There's a fumous experiment by a psy­
chologist named Daniel Simons, head of the Visual Cognition Lab
at the University of Illinois, called Gorillas in Our Midst) that shows
you how bad people's visual awareness is. In the experiment they
show people a videotape of a basketball game and ask them to COunt
how many passes one team makes. Then, a little while into the tape,
while everyone is sitting there counting passes, a woman wearing a
gorilla suit walks onto the screen, stops, turns, faces the camera, and
beats her fists on her chest.
Fifty percent of all people who watch this video don't see the
gorilla!
Even when experimenters ask them directly, "Did you notice the
gorilla?" they say, "The what?" It's not that they don't remember the
lady in the gorilla suit. Anyone who's forgotten something he saw
will remember it when you give him a prompt. These folks actually
didn't see the lady gorilla in the first place. She didn't register.6
The experimenters tested out their theory with another video in
My Story
25
which an actor suddenly changes into a whole different person, wear­
ing a completely different set of dothes. Seventy percent of normal
people don't notice that, either. They also don't notice it in real life.
In one study a blond-haired man wearing a yellow shirt handed stu­
dents a form to fill out, then took the completed form behind a
bookcase to file. When he came back out he was a dark-haired man
wearing a blue shirt. He wasn't the same guy in disguise; he was a
whole different person. It didn't matter. Seventy-five percent of the
students had no idea they'd just interacted with two different people.
The scariest study, though, was the one NASA did with commer­
cial airplane pilots. The researchers put them in a flight simulator
and asked them to do a bunch of routine landings. But on some of
the landing approaches the experimenters added the image of a large
commercial airplane parked on the runway, something a pilot would
never see in real life (at least, let's hope not). One quarter of the
pilots landed right on top ofthe airplane. They never saw it.
I've seen photographs from the study, and what's interesting is
that if you're not a pilot, the parked plane is obvious. You can't miss
it, and you don't have to be autistic to see it, either? I'd bet the
ranch that the only people who could possibly miss that plane would
have to be commercial pilots. If you're a professional, expecting to
see what a professional normally would see, there's a 25 percent
chance you'll miss a huge commercial aircraft parked crossways
blocking the landing strip in a flight simulator.
That's because normal people's perceptual systems are built to see
what they're used to seeing. If they're used to seeing gorillas in the
middle of basketball games, they see gorillas. If they're not used to
seeing gorillas in the middle of basketball games, they don't. They
have inattentional blindness.
I have no idea how a visual thinker would do on these experi­
ments, but my guess is visual thinkers would see the gorilla a lot
more often than verbal thinkers. I'm almost positive there's no prey
animal on earth who would miss that gorilla, that's for sure, though
I think predators would see the gorilla, too. A predator, by the way,
is an animal like a dog or a cat who hunts and kills other animals for
food; a prey animal is the animal the predator hunts. There's also
another category of animals you don't hear about as much, which is
11
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26
Animals in Translation
I
the scavenger animals (like vultures) who do eat meat but don't kill
the animals they eat. All animals, including human beings, fall into
at least one of these categories, and quite a few-including a lot of
primates-belong to more than one. Humans are more predators
than prey, but we share qualities with both. In terms of the size of
our teeth, we're defenseless, but as soon as we developed tools we
became predators.
It's so hard for normal people to see what scares cattle that I finally
developed a checklist of mostly visual details for plant managers to
look out for. Things like pieces of metal that wiggle, reflections on
water, bright spots, contrasts of color, and air hissing or blowing in
their faces. I tell the owners, if you have three "bad" details you have
to correct all three. Then your animal will walk up the chute without
any trouble and you can throwaway your electric prod.
Visual thinkers ofany species, animal or human, are detail-oriented.
They see everything and they react to everything. We don't know
why this is true, we just know from experience that it is. I've had
interior designers tell me, "I see everything." The worst thing that
can happen to an interior designer is to work with a sloppy contrac­
tor. The designer will see every little flaw in the contractor's work.
Tiny mistakes no one else even notices, like grout that's slightly
uneven, will jump out at visual people. They go crazy. Visual people
feel horrible when little details in their visual environments are
wrong, the same way animals do.
I think this is probably the hardest part of an animal's existence
for normal people to relate to. Verbal people can't just turn them­
selves into visual people because they want to, and vice versa.
-
-'
Eo-
CJ
:...
::::
I hope this book will help regular people be a little less verbal and a
little more visual. I've spent thirty years as an animal scientist, and
I've spent my whole life as an autistic person. I hope what I've
learned will help people start over again with animals (and maybe
with autistic people, too), and begin to think about them in a differ­
entway.
I hope what I've learned will help people see.
.-li.
-'''M _
(j)
ANIMAL GENIUS: EXTREME TALENTS I
t's getting to be obvious even to skeptics that animals are smarter
than we think.
The question is, how much smarter?
My answer is that there are some animals who, like some people,
have a form of genius. These animals have talents that are so extraor­
dinary they're way past anything any normal human being could do
even with a lot of hard work and practice.
Who are these animals?
Birds, for one. The more I learn about birds, the more I'm begin­
ning to think we have no idea what the limits to some bird species'
intelligence are. Bird migration is probably the most extraordinary
talent we know about right now. Birds have brains no bigger than a
walnut, but they can learn and remember migratory routes thou­
sands of miles in distance. The Arctic tern has the longest migratory
route we know about: 18,000 miles, round-trip. Some of these birds
travel from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again every
year.
EXTREME MEMORY
What makes this a genius-level ability instead of just some miracu­
lous ability that's built into the species, like having wings and being
able to fIy, is the fact that birds have to learn these routes. They
aren't born knowing their species' migratory route; it isn't hard­
Wired. Moreover, they learn the routes with almost no effort at all.
'.
286
Animals in Translation
Animal Genius: Extreme Talents
Many migratory birds have genius-level learning abilities when it
comes to migration.
There's a good movie about these birds called F(y Away Home,
based on the story of Bill Lishman, the man who, along with his
partner, Joseph Duff, taught a bunch of Canada geese to follow him
in his ultralight airplane. They created the project because they
wanted to try to save the whooping cranes, which are on the verge
of extinction. Operation Migration, the charity Bill Lishman
founded, says there are only 188 whooping cranes left in the world.
They're all in one big flock, which makes them even more vulnerable
to extinction.
Up until Bill Lishman came along people were trying to save the
species by raising baby whooping cranes in captivity. But it wasn't
working because when the babies were brought up without any
migrating adults to teach them the routes, there was no way to
reintroduce them to the wild. They didn't know how to migrate, so
when winter came they would just stay put and die in the cold.
Bill Lishman had the idea of teaching the whooping cranes to
migrate by leading them along a migration path in his ultralight
plane, a small one-person airplane that can fly as slowly as 28 to 58
miles per hour. He started out working with Canada geese, because
geese aren't in danger of going extinct. Any golfer on the East Coast
can tell you there's no goose shortage. As a matter of fact the goose
poop problem has gotten so out of hand that some Border collies
are getting a brand-new job working goose patrol at golf courses.
That's good, because Border collies need a job. They get antsy living
a life ofleisure.
Pretty quickly Mr. Lishman managed to show that you could
teach geese to follow a human in an ultralight airplane, and you
could teach them a four-hundred·mile one-way migration route fly­
ing it just once. No human being could memorize a four-hundred­
mile route across unmarked open terrain after traveling it just one
time. Bird migration is an extreme talent.
After he knew he could do it with geese, he switched to sandhill
cranes, which are related to whooping cranes but aren't endangered.
In 1997 he led seven sandhill cranes from southern Ontario down to
Virginia, a four-hundred-mile trip one way. The cranes spent the
winter in Virginia and then, one day at the end of March, they went
out for their daily foraging and didn't come back. Two days later
Mr. Lishman got a call from a school principal up in Ontario who
said he had six big birds in his schoolyard entertaining the students!
Six of the seven birds had made it the whole four hundred miles
back to Canada, after having flown the route only once in their lives,
and in the opposite direction. They ended up thirty miles away from
where they'd been fledged.
Lots of animals have extreme memory and learning abilities in one
realm or another. Gray squirrels bury hundreds of nuts every winter,
one nut in each burial spot, and they remember them all. They re­
member where they hid each nut, what kind of nut it was, and even
when they hid it. They're not just marking the spots some way, or find­
ing the nuts by smell, which is what a lot ofpeople probably assume. I
read a gardening column the other day where a woman wrote in asking
whether there was any way to keep squirrels from digging up her gar­
den. The columnist answered that squirrels forget where they've buried
their nuts, so they dig everything up. That is not true. Squirrels re­
member exactly where they buried hundreds and hundreds of nuts. Dr.
Pierre Lavenex at the University of California, Berkeley, a researcher
who studies memory in gray squirrels, says, "They use information
from the environment, such as the relative position of trees and build­
ings, and they triangulate, relying on the angles and distances between
these distant landmarks and their caches. ''1
No human can do tllat. A normal human can't even remember
where he put the car keys half the time, let alone where he buried
five hundred individual nuts. How long would a person last ifhe had
to eat buried nuts for food? He wouldn't get tluough the winter,
that's for sure. "People can do this [Le. triangulate landmarks to find
the precise spot where they've buried something] for a few sites,"
Dr. Lavenex says, "maybe six or seven, but not for nearly as many as
squirrels do."
Most animals have "superhuman" skills like tllls: animals have
animal genius. Birds are navigation geniuses, dogs are smell
geniuses, eagles are visual geniuses-it can be anything.
287
288
Animals in Translation
EXTREME PERCEPTION
AND ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE
Many animals also have extreme perception. Forensic dogs are three
times as good as any X-ray machine at sniffing out contraband,
drugs, or explosives, and their overall success rate on tests is 90 per­
cent.
The fact that a dog can smell things a person can't doesn't make
him a genius; it just makes him a dog. Humans can see tblngs dogs
can't, but that doesn't make us smarter.
But when you look at the jobs some dogs have invented for them­
. selves using their advanced perceptual abilities, you're moving into
the realm of true cognition, which is solving a problem under novel
conditions. The seizure alert dogs are an example of an animal using
advanced perceptual abilities to solve a problem no dog was born
knowing how to solve. Seizure alert dogs are dogs who, their own­
ers say, can predict a seizure before it starts. There's still controversy
over whether you can train a dog to predict seizures, and so far peo­
ple haven't had a lot of luck trying. But there are a number of dogs
who have figured it out on their own. These dogs were trained as
seizure-response dogs, meaning they can help a person once a
seizure has begun. The dog might be trained to lie on top of the
person so he doesn't hurt himself, or bring the person his medicine
or the telephone. Those are all standard helpful behaviors any dog
can be trained to perform.
But some of these dogs have gone from responding to seizures to
perceiving signs of a seizure ahead of time. No one knows how they
do this, because the signs are invisible to people. No human being
can look at someone who's about to have a seizure and see (or hear,
smell, or feel) what's coming. Yet one study found that 10 percent
of owners said their seizure response dogs had turned into seizure
alert dogs.
The New York Times published a terrific article about a woman
named Connie Standley, in Florida, who has two huge Bouvier des
Flandres dogs who predict her seizures about thirty minutes ahead
of time. 2 When they sense Ms. Standley is heading into a seizure
they'll do things like pull on her clothes, bark at her, or drag on her
Animal Genius: Extreme Talents
289
hand to get her to someplace safe so she won't get hurt when the
seizure begins. Ms. Standley says they predict about 80 percent of
her seizures. Ms. Standley'S dogs apparently were trained as seizure
alert dogs before they came to her, but there aren't many dogs in
that category. Most of the seizure alert dogs were trained to respond
to seizures, not predict seizures.
The seizure alert dogs remind me of Clever Hans. Hans was the
world-famous German horse in the early 1900s whose owner, Wilhelm
von Osten, thought he could count. Herr von Osten could ask the
horse questions like, "What's seven and five?" and Hans would tap out
the number 12 with his hoof. Hans could even tap out answers to
questions like, "If the eighth day of the month comes on Tuesday,
what is the date for the following Friday?" He could answer mathe­
matical questions posed to him by complete strangers, too.
Eventually a psychologist named Oskar Pfungst managed to show
that Hans wasn't really counting. Instead, Hans was observing sub­
tle, unconscious cues the humans had no idea they were giving of£
He'd start tapping his foot when he could see it was time to start
tapping; then he'd stop tapping his foot when he saw it was time to
stop tapping. His questioners were making tiny, unconscious move­
ments only Hans could see. The movements were so tiny the
humans making them couldn't even feel them.
Dr. Pfungst couldn't see the movements, either, and he was look­
ing for them. He finally solved the case by putting Hans's question­
ers out of view and having them ask Hans questions they didn't
know the answers to themselves. It turned out Hans could answer
questions only when the person asking the question was in plain
view and already knew the answer. If either condition was missing,
his performance fell apart.
Psychologists often use the Clever Hans story to show that
humans who believe animals are intelligent are deluding themselves.
But that's not the obvious conclusion as far as I'm concerned. No
one has ever been able to train a horse to do what Hans did. Hans
trained himself. Is the ability to read a member of a different species
as well as Hans was reading human beings really a sign that he was
just a "dumb animal" who'd been classically conditioned to stamp
his hoof? I think there's more to it than that.
Animals in Translation
Animal Genius: Extreme Talents
What makes Hans similar to the seizure alert dogs is that both
Hans and the dogs acquired their skills without human help. As I
mentioned, to my knowledge, so far no one's figured out how to
take a "raw" dog and teach it how to predict seizures. About the
best a trainer can do is reward the dogs for helping when a person is
having a seizure and then leave it up to the dog to start identifYing
signs that predict the onset of a seizure on his own. That approach
hasn't been hugely successful, but some dogs do it. I think those
dogs are showing superior intelligence the same way a human who
can do something few other people can do shows superior intelli­
gence.
What makes the actions of the seizure alert dogs, and probably of
Hans, too, a sign of high intelligence--or high talent-is the fact
that they didn't have to do what they did. It's one thing for a dog to
start recognizing the signs that a seizure is coming; you might chalk
that up to unique aspects of canine hearing, smell, or vision, like the
fact that a dog can hear a dog whistle while a human can't. But it's
another thing for a dog to start to recognize the signs of an impend­
ing seizure and then decide to do something about it. That's what
intelligence is in humans; intelligence is people using their built-in
perceptual and cognitive skills to achieve useful and sometimes
remarkable goals.
crackey-to signifY either cookie or cracker. Those are the two foods
his owner gives him as treats, so apparently the macaw decided that
cookie-cracker is a food category unto itself, requiring its own word,
which he created by putting "cookie" and "cracker" together. He's
right about cookies and crackers; they are a separate category. Cook­
ies and crackers are both treats, not "real" food. I'm guessing that's
what the bird means when he asks for a crackey; he's probably asking
for junk food.
Another gray parrot, N'Kisi, owned by Aimee Morgana in New
York City, has a vocabulary of over five hundred English words. She
uses the present, past, and future tenses and once used the word
"flied" to mean "flew." She called the aromatherapy oils Aimee uses
"pretty smell medicine."
The point is, we don't know what animals can and can't
fact that we're constantly being dumbfounded by brand-new abili­
ties no one had a clue animals possessed ought to be a lesson to us
about how much we don't know.
290
INVISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE
By now you're probably thinking, if animals are so smart, why hasn't
anyone noticed1
First of all, we have no idea what most animals are doing in the
wild. Even when people like Jane Goodall have been able to spend
years doing dose observation of a group of animals in their native
habitat, we still don't learn what the animals think they're doing, or
what they're communicating to one another about what they're
doing. That's why it's always a surprise when a crow like Betty spon­
taneously bends a wire to make a food hook, or a gray parrot like
Alex suddenly spells the word "nut." Just the other day I met a lady
at a conference who told me about another super-smart bird living
in a Florida hotel. This bird is a macaw who invented a new word-
291
IF ANIMALS ARE So SMART,
WHY AREN'T THEY IN CHARGE?
I think the reason researchers don't take this lesson more to heart is
most people just naturally assume, without stopping to think
about it, that if animals were as smart as humans or smarter, they'd
have more to show for it. Where are all the animal inventions? That's
the big question.
This is the if-animals-were-smart-they-wouldn't-still-be-pooping­
in-the-woods theory of animal cognition. If animals were really
smart, they would have invented flush toilets!
What the indoor plumbing theory of animal IQ forgets is the fact
that plenty of indigenous peoples never invented indoor plumbing,
and they're no less intelligent than anyone else. Our thinking
about animals is a lot like the Europeans' thinking about
cultures in the nineteenth century when European explorers first
began to have a lot of contact with the people of Africa. That was
a time when botanists and zoologists were creating classifications
for every plant and animal on earth, so naturally Europeans created
"'i":7'1(!""""'~,,"'~""
292
Animals in Translation
classifications for humans, too. They thought the Europeans were
the most intelligent, the Asians were next most intelligent, and the
Africans were on the bottom.
The Europeans were wrong about that, probably for some of the
same reasons people will turn out to be wrong about animals, too.
One big mistake the Europeans made was to equate IQ with cul­
tural evolution. Cumulative cultural evolution means that each gen­
eration can build on the knowledge of the generation before it
rather than having to start all over again from scratch. For a culture
to evolve, you have to have cultural ratcheting, which means that a
group of people or animals has to have a way to hold on to the
things the previous generations have learned so the next generation
can add on new things." Cultural ratcheting means a culture can
maintain and pass along an expanding body of knowledge that no
one generation would be able to invent for itself.
Researchers don't know how and why one culture evolves faster
than another, but they do know it's not because of IQ. You proba­
bly have to have things like direct, one-on-one teaching along with
very widespread paying attention and learning so you don't keep los­
knowledge as fast as you gain it.
All human cultures, including indigenous peoples, have cumula­
tive cultural evolution to some degree. But so far researchers think
only birds and maybe chimpanzees also have it. However, there is so
much of animal life we just can't perceive at tllls point, that the time
hasn't come to conclude that animals do or do not have cultural
evolution. Take dolphins, for instance. Dolphins talk back and forth
to each other for hours on end. It's completely possible dolphins
could have a rich "mental" culture they've developed over many
generations that's invisible to us. How would we know one way or
the other?
I thought about dolphins when I read A Man Without Words. In
deaf culture people sign the same information to each other over
and over again to make sure every person understands it and has the
same information. The author, Susan Schaller, talks about a picnic
she attended where "even though everyone saw my name and where
I was from in my [signed] introduction, the spelling of my English
name, my namesign, and California'S namesign passed from person
Animal Genius: Extreme Talents
293
to person until everyone was completely satisfied that they had all
seen the exact same information."
I wonder whether dolphins are doing something like that, passing
precious cultural information from dolphin to dolphin over and over
again to make sure none of it gets lost. Dolphins don't have books
or hands, so they can't record the things they know in writing or in
objects they've built. I say this because early humans didn't have
written language, either, but they made simple tools, clothing, and
shelters that could probably serve both as objects and as the instruc­
tions on how to make the object. (When an object is really simple,
you can tell a lot about how to make it just by looking at it.)
But if you have only oral communication, and you've built a com­
plex culture, then passing your culture along would be like playing
the game Telephone. You'd be constantly in danger of having distor­
tions come into the transmission process, ruining the knowledge
you're trying to pass along. The only way to keep this from happen­
ing would be to develop a strict habit of repeating each piece of
knowledge over and over again, back and forth, to make sure the
person or dolphin you're transmitting to has received an exact copy
of your message, not an approximation.
SMART, BUT DIFFERENT
I think animals are smarter than we know. I also think a lot of ani­
mals probably have a different kind of intelligence than g, the gen­
eral fluid intelligence normal people have.
In the last chapter I said that animals are cognitive specialists.
They're smart in some things, not smart in others. People are gener­
alists, meaning that a person who's smart in one area will be smart in
others, too. That's what IQ tests show.
Autistic people are smart the way animals are smart. We're special­
ists. Autistic people can have IQ scores all over the map. Donna
Williams, an autistic woman from Australia who wrote a memoir
called Nobody Nowhere, has written that her own scores on the dif­
ferent subscales range all the way from mentally retarded to genius. I
believe it.4
After many years observing animals and living with autism, I have
294
Animals in Translation
come to the conclusion that animals with extreme talents are
to autistic savants.
If you've never met an autistic savant, you might want to watch
the movie Rain Man, which is about an autistic savant, Raymond,
and his brother. Raymond couldn't fix himself a piece of toast with­
out setting the kitchen on fire, but he could count cards in a game
blackjack and win thousands of dollars. That kind of disparity is
typical with autistic savants. When you get outside their specialty
they're almost never as smart or capable as normal people. That's
why they used to be called idiot savants. Just like animals with
extreme talent, autistic savants can naturally do things no normal
human being can even be taught to do, no matter how hard he tries
to learn or how much time he spends practicing. Yet they usually
have IQs in the mentally retarded range.
Animal Genius: Extreme Talents
I think we're letting a huge amount of talent go to waste, both in
people who aren't "normal" and in animals who are. That's proba­
bly because we don't really understand what animals could do if we
gave them a chance. We're just leaving it up to animals like the
seizure alert dogs to invent their own jobs.
AUTISTIC SAVANTS
I mentioned at the beginning ofthis book that I think animal genius is probably the same thing as autistic savantry. I've felt this way for years, just from being around animals and observing them, and I mentioned it in Thinking in Pictures. But I didn't know why autistic genius and animal genius looked so similar to me, or whether autistic genius and animal genius might come from the same difference in the brain. It's not that autistic savants and animal savants do the same
things. Animal savants show brilliance when they learn complicated
migratory routes after just one flight or discover how to perceive
seizures before they happen. Autistic savants do lightning-fast calen­
dar or prime number calculations inside their heads, or become artis­
tic savants who can make almost perfect line drawings of buildings
and landscapes from memory, often starting from a very young
age-and using perftct perspective. That's especially amazing, because
even great artists have to be taught how to draw using perspective. A
four-year-old autistic savant just naturally knows how to do it.
Even though autistic savantry and animal savantry seem so differ­
ent on the surface, the one thing that did jump out was that a lot of
these talents involve amazing feats of rote memory. Autistic people
are known for their ability to memorize whole train schedules, the
capitals of every country in the world, and so on. Autistic savants are
the only people who seem like they could give a Clark's nutcracker a
run for its money when it comes to remembering where they hid
thirty thousand pine seeds. But beyond that, I didn't know why ani­
mal genius felt so familiar
to
me.
299
Then in 1999 Dr. Allan Snyder, a psychologist at the Centre for
the Mind at Australian National University, published a paper that
laid out a unified theory of all the different savant talents. If his the­
ory is right, it probably explains animal genius, too? Dr. Snyder and
his co-author, Dr. D. John Mitchell, say that all the different autistic
savant abilities come from the fact that autistic people don't process
what they see and hear into unified wholes, or concepts, rapidly the
way normal people do.
A normal person looks at a building and his brain turns all the
hundreds and thousands of building pieces coming in through his
sensory channels into one unified thing, a building. The brain does
this automatically; a normal person can't not do it. That's why a
common drawing lesson art teachers use is to have art students turn
a picture upside down and copy it that way, or else draw the negative
space surrounding an object instead of the object itself. Turning the
object upside down or drawing the negative space tricks your brain
into letting the image stay in separate pieces more easily,S so you can
draw the object instead of your unified concept of the object. People
are always amazed at how good their upside-down drawings are.
Autistic people are stuck in the pieces stage ofperception to a greater
or lesser degree, depending on the person. Donna Williams, the autis­
tic woman who wrote the book Nobody Nowhere, says she can't really
see a whole object all at once. She sees a kind ofslide show of the ob­
ject. Ifshe's looking at a tree, first she might see a branch on that tree,
then the screen changes and she sees a bird sitting on the branch, then
the screen changes again and she sees some leaves, and so on. Some
autistic people have tlus problem a lot worse than others, and I tllink
it's possible some autistic people have such fragmented sensory systems
that they may be almost blind or deaf. I wonder whether some autistic
people are so deprived of coherent sensory input that they are like
autistic Helen Kellers.
Snyder and Mitchell say that the reason autistic people see the
pieces of things is that they have privileged access to lower levels of
raw information. A normal person doesn't become conscious of
what he's looking at until after his brain has composed the sensory
bits and pieces into wholes. An autistic savant is conscious of the bits
and pieces.
Animals in Translation
Animal Genius: Extreme Talents
That's why autistic savants can make perspective drawings without
being taught how. They're drawing what they see, which is all the
little changes in size and texture that tell you one object is closer up
and another object is farther away. Normal people can't see aU those
little changes without a lot of training and effort, because their
brains process them unconsciously. So normal people are drawing
what they "see," which is the finished object, after their brains have
put it all together. Normal people don't draw a dog, they draw a
concept of a dog. Autistic people draw the dog.
It's ironic that we always say autistic children are in their own lit­
tle worlds, because if Dr. Snyder is right it's normal people who are
living inside their heads. Autistic people are experiencing the actual
world much more directly and accurately than normal people, with
all their inattentional blindness and their change blindness and their
every-other-kind-of-blindness. (Dr. Snyder hasn't talked about inat­
tentional or change blindness that I know of, but the research on
those concepts supports his work.)
Math savants use this same brain difference to do calendar calcula­
tions and prime number identification. An autistic savant who can
tell you on what day you were born is seeing time as a sequence of
seven different days repeating over and over again going back to the
beginning of time. They quickly scan back over the pattern Wltil
they come to your day.
Normal people don't experience time that way. To a normal per­
son a month or a year or a decade is one unified time span, not a
collection of separate and distinct days. It's a blur. (Dr. Snyder's the­
ory is a little more complicated than I've been making it sound. He
thinks the brain has a processor that divides all incoming data-time,
space, objects, and so forth-into equal parts. That's why an autistic
savant can tell whether a number is prime or not, because a prime
number can't be divided.)
Calendar calculation is the hidden figure talent allover again. I
believe most or even all of the savant talents autistic people have are
variations on the hidden figure ability.
I also believe that most or even all of the savant talents animals have
are variations on the hidden figure ability, and in just the past couple of
years Dr. Snyder and Dr. Bruce Miller, a physician at the University of
California at San Francisco, have supplied some hard evidence that I
may be right. Dr. Miller works with patients who have a disorder called
frontotemporal dementia in which the front part of the brain progres­
sively loses its functions. In frontotemporal dementia the frontal lobes
and the temporal lobes, which are at the side of your head, are af­
9
fected. Neither ofthese areas is working well in autistic people either,
and as I've been saying throughout this book, the biggest area ofdif­
ference between the animal brain and the human brain is that an ani­
mal's frontal lobes are smaller and less well developed than a human's.
Serious frontal lobe damage is worse than being autistic. Ifyour frontal
lobes are badly damaged you can have symptoms of practically all the
psychiatric disorders-autism, ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder,
severe mood disorders, you name it.
You're probably going to have at least some autistic symptoms. We
know that Dr. Miller's patients do, because some of them start to
develop savant talents. A few of these people have become artists in
their fifties and sixties, even winning awards in art shows. Others
have developed musical abilities; one patient invented a chemical
detector and got a patent for it. When he made his invention he
could name only one out of fifteen objects on a standardized word
test. A patient who had lost all his language ability designed sprin­
klers! These patients had sudden-onset talents.
I suspect what's happening with these people is that all of a sud­
den they're able to have the same kind of hyper-specific perception
that underlies an autistic savant's ability to do a calendar calculation
or make a perspective drawing without being taught.
Dr. Snyder has now begun to test the proposition that savant tal­
ents come from conscious access to the raw data of the brain. When
he uses magnetic stimulation to interfere with frontal lobe function­
ing in his subjects, they start to make much more detailed drawings
than they could just moments before. lo They also get better at
proofreading. Before he turns on the magnetic stimulation, Dr. Sny­
der has his subjects read this poem out loud:
300
A bird in the hand is worth two in the the bush 301
302
Animals in Translation
Animal Genius: Extreme Talents
Almost all people look at the poem and say, "A bird in the hand is
worth two in the bush."
About five minutes after he turns on the magnetic stimulation
some of his subjects suddenly read, "A bird in the hand is worth two
in the the bush." The duplicate "the" pops out at them as their left
frontal-temporal lobes go down, and they start turning into hidden
figure specialists, perceiving detail they didn't perceive before. One
of them even told Dr. Snyder that he felt more "alert" and "con­
scious of detail." He was so intensely aware of the details around
him that he said he wished they had asked him to write an essay,
something he normally didn't like to do.
way back. It looks the same to him, even though he's seeing it from
a different side.
THE DEVIL
Is
IN THE DETAILS
I don't know whether extreme talents in animals work the same way
Dr. Snyder thinks they work in people with autism, but we have a lot
of evidence that animals at least see the world in sharper detail than
regular people do. I've already talked about how important visual
detail is to animals, but we also have some fascinating research on
ant navigation that goes along with Dr. Snyder's experiments.
When ants walk through an obstacle course they use landmarks to
remember their route the same way people do. If they pass a gray
pebble going one way, they'll look for that same gray pebble coming
back.
But there's one big difference. When an ant reaches a landmark,
he does something normal people don't do. He passes the landmark,
stops, turns around, and looks at the landmark from the same spot
where he saw it on the trip out.
He has to do that, because to an ant a gray pebble probably looks
different coming and going. He has to see the pebble from the same
vantage point where he saw it first to make sure it's still the same
gray pebble he saw before. This says to me ants probably don't auto­
matically combine separate pieces of sensory data into wholes in the
same way or to the same degree normal humans do.
For a non autistic person, a landmark looks the same coming or
going. When a normal person sees a big red barn on the way to
someone's house, he automatically sees the same big red barn on the
303
That's because a normal person's nervous system gets rid of a lot
of detail and then fills in the blanks with whatever he expects to see.
If he were consciously seeing what's really in front of his eyes, he'd
see a slightly different red barn coming and going, because the
south side of a barn doesn't look exactly like the north side of a
barn, and the east side doesn't look exactly like the west side. Even if
the builder designed all four sides to be identical, in nature there's
always a difference in light and shadow.
I do the same thing ants do, which is one more thing that makes
me think hyper-specificity is a key link between animals and autistic
people. When I drive someplace I've never been before I look for
landmarks along the road the same way everyone else does. But then
when I'm driving back, the landmarks I've picked out all look differ­
ent to me. I have to drive past each landmark until I reach the spot
where I was when I first saw it; then I turn around and look at it
from the original angle to make sure it's the same thing I saw on my
way out. For animals and for people with autism, different sides of
the same object actually look different.
THINKING ABOUT WHAT ANIMALS CAN Do, NOT WHAT THEY CAN'T I hope we'll start to think more about what animals can do, and less about what they can't. It's important, because we've gotten too far away from the animals who should be our partners in life, not just pets or objects of study.
You always hear that humans domesticated animals, that we
turned wolves into dogs. But new research shows that wolves proba­
bly domesticated people, too. Humans co-evolved with wolves; we
changed them and they changed us.
The story of how researchers have begun to piece this together is
an example of conve'lJing lines of evidence, which is what happens
when findings from different fields start to fit together and all point
in the same direction. For a long time, the best evidence researchers
had about when and how wolves turned into dogs came from
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Animals in Translation
archaeological discoveries of dog remains that had been carefully
buried underneath humans' huts. Some archaeologists found dogs
and people buried together in the same grave.
Those first buried dogs date back about 14,000 years. Humans
had not yet invented farming at that time, but they had the same
bodies and brains we do. So it made sense to conclude that primitive
humans evolved into modern humans first, then began to associate
with wild wolves who subsequently evolved into the domestic dog,
in order to serve as working dogs and pets.
But a study by Robert K Wayne and his colleagues at UCLA of
DNA variability in dogs found that dogs had to have diverged from
wolves as a separate population 135,000 years ago. l l The reason the
fossil record doesn't show any dogs with humans before 14,000
years ago is probably that before then people were partnered with
wolves, or with wolves that were evolving into dogs. Sure enough,
fossil records do show lots of wolf bones close to human bones
before 100,000 years ago.
If Dr. Wayne is right, wolves and people were together at the
point when homo sapiens had just barely evolved from homo erectus.
When wolves and humans first joined together people only had a
few rough tools to their name, and they lived in very small nomadic
bands that probably weren't any more socially complicated than a
band of chimpanzees. Some researchers thlnk these early humans
may not even have had language.
This means that when wolves and people first started keeping
company they were on a lot more equal footing than dogs and peo­
ple are today. Basically, two different species with complementary
skills teamed up together, something that had never happened
before and has really never happened since.
Going over all the evidence, a group of Australian anthropolo­
gists believes that during all those years when early humans were
associating with wolves they learned to act and think like wolves. 12
Wolves hunted in groups; humans didn't. Wolves had complex social
structures; humans didn't. Wolves had loyal same-sex and nonkin
friendships; humans probably didn't, judging by the lack of same­
sex and non kin friendships in every other primate species today.
(The main relationship for chimpanzees is parent-child.) Wolves
Animal Genius: Extreme Talents
305
were highly territorial; humans probably weren't-again, judging by
how non territorial all other primates are today.
By the time these early people became truly modern, they had
learned to do all these wolfie things. When you think about how dif­
ferent we are from other primates, you see how doglike we are. A lot
of the things we do that the other primates don't are dog things.
The Australian group thinks it was the dogs who showed us how.
They take their line of reasoning even further. Wolves, and then
dogs, gave early humans a huge survival advantage, they say, by serv­
ing as lookouts and guards, and by making it possible for humans to
hunt big game in groups instead of hunting small prey as individu­
als. Given everything wolves did for eady man, dogs were probably a
big reason why early man survived and Neanderthals didn't. Nean­
derthals didn't have dogs.
But dogs didn't just help people stay alive long enough to repro­
duce. Dogs probably also made it possible for humans to pull ahead
of all their primate cousins. Paul Tacon, principal research scientist at
the Australian Museum, says that the development of human friend­
ship "was a tremendous survival advantage because that speeds up
the exchange of ideas between groups of people." All cultural evolu­
tion is based on cooperation, and humans learned from dogs how to
cooperate with people they aren't related to.13
Maybe the most amazing new finding is that wolves didn't just
teach us a lot of useful new behaviors. Wolves probably also changed
the structure of our brains. Fossil records show that whenever a
species becomes domesticated its brain gets smaller. The horse's
brain shrank by 16 percent; the pig's brain shrank as much as 34
percent; and the dog's brain shrank 10 to 30 percent. This probably
happened because once humans started to take care of these animals,
they no longer needed various brain functions in order to survive. I
don't know what functions they lost, but I do know all domestic
animals have reduced fear and anxiety compared to wild animals.
Now archaeologists have discovered that 10,000 years ago, just at
the point when humans began to give their dogs formal burials, the
human brain began to shrink, too. It shrank by 10 percent, just like
the dog's brain. And what's interesting is what part of the human
brain shrank. In all of the domestic animals the forebrain) which
......­
Animals in Translation
Animal Genius: Extreme Talents
holds the frontal lobes, and the corpus callosum, which is the con­
necting tissue between the two sides of the brain, shrank. But in
humans it was the midbrain, which handles emotions and sensory
data, and the olfactory bulbs, which handle smell, that got smaller
while the corpus callosum and the forebrain stayed pretty much the
same. Dog brains and human brains specialized: humans took over
the planning and organizing tasks, and dogs took over the sensory
tasks. Dogs and people coevolved and became even better partners,
allies, and friends.
sugar is low, and Max had figured that out. 14 The lady who owned
him was a severe diabetic, and if her blood sugar levels got low dur­
ing the night Max would wake up her husband and bug him until he
got up and took care of her.
You have to think about that story for only five seconds to realize
how much dogs have to offer. Dogs and a lot ofother animals.
306
"DOGS MAKE
Us
HUMAN"
The Aborigines have a saying: "Dogs make us human." Now we
know that's probably literally true. People wouldn't have become
who we are today ifwe hadn't co-evolved with dogs.
I think it's also true, though in a different way, that all animals
make us human. That's why I hope we'll start to think more respect­
fully about animal intelligence and talent. That would be good for
people, because there are a lot of things we can't do that animals
can. We could use their help.
But it would be good for animals, too. Dogs first started livinb
with people because people needed dogs and dogs needed people.
Now dogs still need people, but people have forgotten how much
they need dogs for anything besides love and companionship. That's
prbbably okay for a dog who's been bred to be a companion animal,
but a lot of the bigger breeds and practically all of the mixed breeds
were built for work. Having a job to do is part of their nature; it's
who they are. The sad thing is, now that hardly anyone makes his
living herding sheep, most dogs are out of a job.
It doesn't have to be that way. I read a little story on the Web site
for the American Veterinary Medical Association that shows the
incredible things animals are capable of doing, and would do if we
gave them the chance. It was about a dog named Max who had
trained himself to monitor his mistress's blood sugar levels even
while she was asleep. No one knows how Max was doing this, but
my guess is people must smell slightly different when their blood
307
People always wonder how I can work in the meatpacking industry
when I love animals so much. I've thought about this a lot.
After I developed my center-track restraining system, I remember
looking out over the cattle yard at the hundreds and hundreds of
animals milling around in their corrals. I was upset that I had just
designed a really efficient slaughter plant. Cows are the animals I
love best.
Looking at those animals I realized that none of them would
even exist if human beings hadn't bred them into being. And ever
since that moment I've believed that we brought these animals here,
so we're responsible for them. We owe them a decent life and a
decent death, and their lives should be as low-stress as possible.
That's my job.
Now I'm writing this book because I wish animals could have
more than just a low-stress life and a quick, painless deatll. I wish
animals could have a good life, too, with something useful to do. I
think we owe them that.
Another reason I'm writing tllis book is that I want to inspire
more young people to do what I do. I am worried about who is
going to replace me. There is a great need for more students to get
involved with working hands-on in the field. The most powerful
agent of real constructive change is often a person who has both
high-level university training and practical experience. The hands-on
field experience keeps the person grounded in reality, but higher
education provides the knowledge that will enable the person to
deVelop effective practical solutions for problems. Good fieldwork
sometimes requires months or weeks of sustained hard work. My
work is tiring, stressful, and dirty, but it is also highly rewarding to
308
Animals in Translation
see progress and to know that I have helped improve the quality of
life for many animals.
I don't know if people will ever be able to talk to animals the way
Doctor Doolittle could, or whether animals will be able to talk back.
Maybe science will have something to say about that.
But I do know people can learn to "talk" to animals, and to hear
what animals have to say, better than they do now. I also know that a
lot of times people who can talk to animals are happier than people
who can't. People were animals, too, once, and when we turned into
human beings we gave something up. Being close to animals brings
some of it back.
BEHAVIOR AND TRAINING TROUBLESHOOTING GUIDE T
raining, solving behavior problems, and understanding why animals do
what they do will be easier if you know the motivations for different
behaviors.
Animal behavior is a complex mixture of learned behaviors, biologically
based emotion, and hardwired instinctual behavior.
Examples of hardwired behaviors are bird mating dances and a dog
chasing something that moves rapidly. Ethologists call these behaviors,
which are always the same and never vary from one member of a species
to another, fixed action patterns. Fixed action patterns are turned on
sign stimuli. The sign stimulus for prey chasing is rapid movement, while
a bird's mating dance is triggered by the sight of a potential mate as well
as a surge of hormones.
The fixed action pattern is hardwired but the particular sign stimulus that
turns it on is determined by learning and emotion. A basic principle of an­
imal behavior is that WHO you have sex with, WHAT you eat, WHERE
you eat, WHO you fight with, and WHO you socialize with are learned. In
dogs the killing bite is instinctual, but the animal learns what to kill and
what not to kill. Chasing things that move rapidly is instinctual, but a dog
learns that he can chase a ball but he cannot chase children.
Brain research now shows that the way the brain processes various core
motivations, or emotions, is different. Example: fear and rage are neuro­
logically very different. Being scared and being angry are two different
feelings. Both humans and mammals have similar systems in the brain for
processing basic emotions.
Another important principle in shaping animal behavior is the fact that
animals are individuals. One dog may have high social motivation and
respond well to praise alone. Another dog may be more motivated by
food rewards. The degree of fearfulness varies greatly between different
breeds of animals, but the range of fearfulness within tlle same breed may
also vary greatly. On average, Arab horses and Border collies have higher
fearfulness than quarter horses and Rottweilers, but there will be some
low-fear Arabs who will have the lower fear levels of a quarter horse.